Isaac Asimov's Aurora

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  “Nova Levis,” she said.

  “That explains everything,” Mia said, giving her a significant look.

  Kru nodded sharply. “Time to stop it. They killed Tilla.”

  Mia watched Kru confer with the cyborgs again. A few of them left abruptly. Several more shook their heads violently, obviously refusing a request. But one of them glared at the others and shouted. Mia could not understand the language, but she caught the essence of the message. A few more left. The rest—about eight of them now—gathered around Kru to confer further.

  Then Kru motioned for her to join them.

  “They can get us in past perimeter security,” Kru said. “They’re afraid, but they agree with our purpose.”

  “What is our purpose?”

  Kru looked at her as if she had just said the most idiotic thing possi­ble.

  “You’re from up there, right?” Kru jabbed a thumb skyward.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Mia shook her head. “It’s complicated—”

  “No, it’s not. You’re here to stop them.” She pointed at the building. “Even if you don’t know it, that’s why you’re here. Everything that made you come here starts there. Your purpose, my purpose, their purpose—” she indicated the cyborgs “—is to stop that.”

  “Why haven’t they done it before?”

  “Only humans can get deep enough in. They need us to finish what they want to start.” Kru nodded. “Our purpose is to end it.”

  She spat on the ground and faced Mia, hands on hips.

  Crazy, but determined, Mia thought. She looked past Kru to the struc­ture. There was something familiar about it. Had there been any mention of a laboratory in any of the material she had gone over?

  Yes, but it had been little more than a footnote. She remembered that part of the initial agreement with Solaria had been the setting aside of land for a research facility, a joint endeavor between Earth and a Solar­ian company. The agreement had been necessary in large part because the original Settler program had been comprised of religious techno­phobes—in itself a curious thing, since just getting here required such a high degree of technology as to seemingly violate any statement of moral purpose based on a rejection of said technology.

  Had it been called Nova Levis? It sounded right.

  But what had it been researching?

  “Coming?” Kru asked.

  “Certainly,” Mia answered.

  The ten of them marched on toward the structure.

  The cyborgs veered north about a hundred meters from the base of the wall. They followed a berm, crouching below its crest, for another fifty meters, where a cut had been made through the earth in the direction of the lab. A short way along this declivity, a tunnel opened in the wall.

  They had to crawl in pitch dark for a dozen meters or more. Mia kept going doggedly, keeping tabs on those before and behind by sound alone.

  Ahead, a dim glow broke the blackness. They emerged into a damp tunnel lit by failing biolumens. Mia inspected the hole through which they had entered. It had been torn in the wall of the tunnel, sharp edges folded back on themselves.

  One of the cyborgs picked her up.

  “Got to be close to one,” Kru said. “Trust them.”

  Mia remembered another time being carried through caverns and let herself relax.

  The cyborgs moved quickly.

  The tunnel ended at the giant reservoir. The striated scarring and cor­rosion on the walls implied that it had been empty for a long time, unused. A ladder shot up the far wall. Her cyborg scurried up, one-handed, in a fast, jerky rhythm that ended before she became terrified.

  They regrouped on a platform above the reservoir. Kru whispered in her ear. “Two more accesses, then we’re on our own.”

  “Can’t the sensors detect them?”

  “Sure, but they busted them here a long time ago. The lab never repaired them after it became clear that they couldn’t get any further.”

  “So how are we supposed to get in?”

  “That’s your job,” Kru said.

  “Mine.”

  But Kru stepped away and gave a sharp order. The cyborgs proceeded through a heavy doorway at the back of the platform. Mia looked around at the enclosed space, the steel cave, and felt momentarily nostalgic.

  Back on Earth after all these years . . .

  They went through a series of corridors that showed long neglect. Heavy doors had been wrenched off their hinges. Mia glimpsed security arrays along the ceiling that had been smashed or removed, cables cut or ripped out, holes where other devices had been removed.

  Finally, they stopped in a chamber that looked very much like a decontamination facility.

  Kru walked up to a dust-laden console and patted it. “Now you do your part.”

  Mia, bemused, walked up to the console. She stared at the controls, the array of dead screens, and from there let her gaze drift over the entire room.

  “It’s a ship,” she said. “It’s a goddamn ship.”

  Smiling, she touched the power-up sequence. A few moments later, the board flickered to life.

  Kru laughed sharply and clapped her hands.

  Mia ran a diagnostic. The board was old, but basically the same as what she knew from current configurations. It lacked a few details, but it responded predictably.

  She checked its links to the rest of the facility.

  There was an automated supervising program monitoring it. Mia answered its query with a standard response, informing the A.I. that the board was simply doing a routine self-diagnostic. Mia had no way of knowing how long it had been since the last one, but the A.I. accepted the response, logged it, and gave her an all-clear to proceed.

  Mia found the controls for the door and the protocols for access. A complex sensor key provided a failsafe—the sensors would shift control for the door from this board to an outside control if they detected anything biologically questionable. Barring that, Mia could gain them entry.

  “Tell them to leave the chamber,” Mia said, waving at the cyborgs.

  Kru did so. When the two women stood alone before the console, Mia checked for any alarms connected to the interior door. Finding none, she disengaged the lock and ordered the seals retracted.

  Loudly hissing, the isolation door unlocked and swung outward.

  “Yes!” Kru cried, and ran toward it.

  Mia requested a schematic of the local area. The system informed her that such data required security clearance, please enter her code.

  Shrugging, she tapped in her Special Service clearance code.

  Three screens lit up, showing her the architecture beyond this cham­ber.

  It is a ship, she thought, dismayed. What the hell is a ship doing pretending to be a lab?

  “Come on!” Kru barked.

  “Do you even know where you’re going?” Mia asked.

  Kru scowled, but did not move.

  “I do,” Mia said. She stabbed at the middle screen. “That way to bridge. Below that, the comm center.”

  “What do we need with a comm center?”

  “I need to make a call.” She smiled at Kru. “After that, you can tear down anything you like.”

  The day began early, long before dawn. Masid dressed neatly. The weapon fit in a small pouch in the hem of his jacket, right at the bottom snap, where the temperature control unit had been before Masid had removed it. The device seemed made of an inert material that should appear innocuous on a cursory inspection.

  Filoo fetched him shortly thereafter and led the way to the elevator, then up to the rooftop. A pair of guards ran a wand over him at the entrance into the party. Masid waited anxiously for them to find the weapon, but the detector passed it over without a chirp. He walked in among the forty or so guests.

  The party assembled within a secure perimeter on the edge of the build­ing. From here they had an excellent view of the port. Bright lights spiked the broad field, setting everything into sharp relief below
a black sky.

  A buffet offered drinks and small snacks. Masid took a glass of what appeared to be nava and strolled toward the edge.

  Conversation was subdued. He sensed the tension and worked to stay calm. Filoo carefully avoided looking at him. Masid studied the scene and decided that if he did anything here, there was absolutely no way of escape. He had decided already how unlikely that would be, but still hoped to find some avenue out. But beyond that, aside from the scanners and the guards’ blasters, there appeared to be no power source from which his little dead weapon might draw a charge.

  Thunder rolled from the sky. Everyone quietened.

  A pinpoint of light start to grow. As he watched, Masid recognized the approach pattern of a large shuttle. The shape took on clear lines, became a definable object, and settled loudly into a blast pit.

  The engines died abruptly, leaving only the sound of cooling metal crackling in the distance. The shuttle hulked in the pit for nearly ten minutes before a hatch appeared.

  An aircar leapt from its pad to the shuttle. People appeared in the hatchway and climbed aboard the car. As it came toward them, guards motioned people out of the way to give the transport room to set down. Masid’s heart raced.

  The vehicle lowered onto the platform. The canopy opened and two more guards stepped out, followed by a thickset man in rich, dark green clothes.

  The audience began to applaud. The man—Kynig Parapoyos, Masid realized—stood there, slightly before his bodyguards, grinning hugely and reveling in the adoration. Almost too late, Masid remembered to set down his glass and clap his hands. He was surprised. He had imagined countless possible scenarios of finally meeting Kynig Parapoyos, the most powerful criminal in settled space. What he had never imagined, never considered, was that he would know who Parapoyos was—that he would, in fact, recognize him.

  But the man standing before them all now was someone Masid recog­nized instantly. It was a shock.

  Kynig Parapoyos was the Solarian Ambassador Gale Chassik.

  32

  Mia thought she understood where she was and why she was being allowed access so easily, but she needed to get to a place where she could do a better analysis of the systems. The decontamination chamber console did not provide much in the way of information about the rest of the structure.

  The cyborgs rushed through the opened isolation door and ranged out along the corridors, checking rooms, and searching for active sensors and monitors. Mia followed unhurriedly. She felt flushed from the fever, but, oddly, her headache was diminishing.

  The construction appeared archaic, but nothing she had not seen aboard dozens of old ships. Starships were expensive and much more practical to overhaul than to scrap. She had been on Spacer ships over three hundred years old, lovingly maintained and thoroughly upgraded throughout their lifetimes.

  “Where do we need to go?” Kru asked.

  “Depends,” Mia replied. “What do you want to do?”

  “Shut it all down.”

  The pair of cyborgs with them listened silently, but Mia thought she recognized agreement in their eyes.

  “That might be difficult,” Mia said. “In any case, I need to get to some kind of main control station.” She pointed at a hatch. “That should open on an access shaft to the next level. Communications center is one . . . no, two decks up.”

  Mia pressed the button to open the door. Nothing happened, but she could hear the grinding of motors behind the wall. One of the cyborgs then worked fingers into the jamb and shoved the door open.

  The shaft was dark, but she could make out the ladder rungs. She leaned out, ignoring a mild wave of dizziness, and grabbed hold. She climbed up.

  The door on the second deck up worked and she stepped into the cor­ridor. A short way down, she saw a wider doorway standing open. She approached cautiously, but she was becoming convinced no one was in this part of the complex.

  Within, vague shapes mounded in the darkness. Kru came up behind her with a lamp and in the sudden bright light Mia recognized the consoles hugging the walls—comms, hyperwaves, decryptors, all nearly forty years out of date, but nothing she did not understand.

  Anxiously, she touched the power-up on a datum interface. The screens glowed to life.

  “First thing,” Mia said, sitting down, “is we find out if anyone knows we’re here.” Slowly, because of minor differences between this and the equipment she had learned on, she began making inquiries. Two screens were dead, but the rest filled with information.

  Masid hung back, dismayed, while the territory bosses came forward to pay respect to Kynig Parapoyos/Gale Chassik. The implications threat­ened to overwhelm him—the Solarian ambassador to Earth ran the largest black market enterprise in human history. That he had never been caught both made sense and seemed incredible. He had been in a nearly ideal position to conduct business between all the fractious elements of dozens of special interest groups.

  But Masid choked off the speculation welling up. None of that mat­tered right now. The immediate task was to find a way to be effective.

  One question required an answer: What was he doing here?

  The ship carrying Chassik back to Solaria—in disgrace, Masid thought—had been attacked. Everyone now believed Chassik dead, along with all the other passengers.

  Why?

  Masid worked through the logic tenuously. Chassik had been recalled from Earth, which suggested that Solaria’s involvement with him was aboveboard. They considered him an ambassador and nothing more. Perhaps a few Solarians knew who he was and had arranged the attack as cover for diverting Chassik from a hearing which could prove embarrassing.

  But Nova Levis was a Solarian property. If Chassik—Parapoyos—ran it, then more than a few Solarians knew and understood. Solaria’s reluc­tance to get involved in this debacle now acquired a more sinister aspect.

  The moneyed interests with a stake in Parapoyos and his various enterprises numbered in the hundreds, touching nearly every Settler world and doubtless a good number of Spacer Worlds. Such a coalition of diverse interests might welcome a single resource, one place where illicit trade could be conducted with impunity.

  It might also suit them to have Parapoyos himself on one planet where everyone knew he could be watched.

  Then why am I here?

  Obviously, not everyone was privy to this situation.

  Parapoyos—somehow, now that he knew, the change of names came easily—moved through the gathering, talking to people. Masid stiffened as the arms dealer approached him.

  “I don’t know you,” Parapoyos said.

  “My name’s Masid. I’m with Filoo.”

  “Ah, Noresk. Worked for him long?”

  “Just started, really. I was independent for a long while.”

  “And Filoo trusts you. Impressive. Welcome.”

  “Thank you.”

  Parapoyos searched for Filoo and smiled, nodding. “Time to move the festivities, I think.” He turned toward his bodyguards. “Get the transports now. I want to see the lab.”

  As Parapoyos moved away, Masid thought of the weapon in his jacket hem, and felt utterly helpless. He had always wondered what kind of sit­uation might render him ineffective and yet leave him in harm’s way.

  Now you know . . .

  The gathering shifted to make room for two more aircars, one of which was quite large. Masid boarded that one and found a place by a window.

  They lifted off and flew in a staggered line to the northwest.

  From above, Masid studied the lab when it hove into view. The com­pound had clearly been added to over time, new sections coiling outward from a central form that looked vaguely familiar.

  As they descended, he stared at the shape. The centerpiece was a bul­bous structure, connected by a long, enclosed arcade to an oblate, fan-like section that formed part of the northwest wall. Against this the rest of the lab huddled, diverse shapes and sizes . . .

  That one structure, though . . . the more he stared, the
more he thought he knew what it was.

  They dropped down onto a platform just in front of the central bulb. He emerged along with the others and stared up at the curved building. In the wall, a door slid aside—

  It’s a ship, Masid thought instantly, recognizing the external airlock hatch. Nova Levis laboratory is a ship . . .

  Parapoyos turned at the hatch and raised his arms.

  “We’ve been working toward a day when we can come out of the shadows of illicit trade and black marketeering,” he said, his voice ampli­fied. “The tool upon which our ambitions have depended is this place, right here. Within this lab, we have developed the future. A small thing, really, but with tremendous impact. You have all been field testing the various scenarios over the last few years. My arrival here is premature, but not so much so that the schedule is in any way threatened. I’ll simply be among you to see the first export of our new product.

  “It somehow seems inappropriate to talk about the future in terms of the trivial, but, in fact, all history has been made by two factors: the impact of the unnoticed, and the advantage taken by those who understand change when it comes. This differs only in the first instance. People will definitely notice. They cannot help but notice. Every time they settle a new world, what we have created here will be waiting for them. Every time they set foot where no one has before, what we have sown will take root in their very beings. And they will have to come to us to live.”

  He laughed. “What every businessman wants! A ready-made market and no competition.”

  The gathering laughed.

  “So,” Parapoyos went on, “let’s go in now and see how our future is doing.”

  In single file, they followed him through the airlock.

  “Arrests are being made throughout the capital,” Penj informed Derec and Ariel as he entered the security operations room. “Byris is wasting no time for a change. I doubt most of the people he’s detaining are directly involved in any of this, but a few are bound to be part of it.”